Tag: DBA Lounge

No one is safe from the TPF Inquisition. Alberto Simões cornered Michael Schwern at YAPC and exacted a confession about the state of Test::Builder 2. No doubt threatened by the horrid torments that only torture by the comfy chair can provide, the Schwern spilled the beans.

Holy Zarquon just released the initial results of the 2010 Perl Survey. The slides are also available. Now for my 2cents worth. Looking at the results I see that very few of the respondents have be ‘taught’ Perl (slide 16) and the majority have an educational background in Computing or Engineering.I think that we in the Perl community should be asking why ‘Perl’ is not being taught at higher institutions.

I’ve just wrote few bits about learning a new technology and after skimming through my Google Reader, I noticed a great post by Gwen Shapira — Deliberate Practice. That’s reminded me about another aspect of learning that I didn’t mention — learning is a continuous process.

For one of our customers, I’ve recently reviewed the strategy of migration from single-byte encoding to variable length multi-byte UTF8 (AL32UTF8 encoding in Oracle naming standards). These type of projects are coming up again and again so I think it must be common for many of you. Thus, this bit might be useful. This is the PL/SQL block I came up with

Here are two little things I hacked on top of Dist::Zilla that peeps might find useful. The first, as hinted by the blog entry’s title, is a direct adaptation of Aristotle’s perldoc-complete for dzil. The second is actually the one that started that round of shaving for me. As there is about a gazillion Dist::Zilla plugins, I wanted to have a quick way to see all the plugins installed on a specific machine. Enter a new dzil sub-command: plugins.

was recently installing one APEX application and needed to upload a bunch of images. APEX was configured to use EGP (Embedded PL/SQL Gateway) so traditional options were to configure FTP or WebDAV but I’d rather not open these services on production environment. Our resident APEX expert pointed me to the installation process and suggested there is a simple way to do that using a single PL/SQL call. It turned out that it was more than a single PL/SQL call involved but nothing too difficult. What you need is to create the hierarchy of files and directories that you want to upload (images or not – doesn’t matter). Then you create an XML file imagelist.xml listing required directories and files to upload. Here is the example:

So how does an Oracle DBA go about learning MySQL?
Obviously you start by reading the docs. Specifically, I looked for the MySQL equivalent of the famous Oracle “Concepts Guide”.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t exist. I couldn’t find any similar overview of the architecture and the ideas behind the database. The first chapter of “High Performance MySQL” had a high level architecture review, which was useful but being just one chapter in a book, it lacked many of the details I wanted to learn. Peter Zaitsev’s “InnoDB Architecture” presentation had the kind of information I needed – but covered just InnoDB.

Laziness and a severe addiction to yak shaving conspire to constantly make me tweak configurations and hack scripts to make my everyday editing / shell / development experience as holistic as possible. Unfortunately the same laziness, combined with my constant hopping between home and work computers, severely gets in the way of effectively using those optimizations. Indeed, although I have those nifty toys installed here and there, because they are not uniformly installed everywhere I constantly find myself using the machines’ functional lowest common denominator. To fix that, I’ve began to dump all my environment’s custom configurations, plugins, tweaks and hacks on Github. That way, I can import my whole baseline toolbox on any given box with a simple line….

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